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So what is troubling me about the Pentecost is the way it seemed to birth hierarchy, right out of thin air (pun intended).
To do this of course, requires that you believe that Spirit is also authority and that Spirit comes from above. Both of those assumptions, it seems to me were to have devastating consequences over the next 2000 years.
First of all, if Spirit is also authority, then the apostles became the first anointed Christian priests, ordained by Spirit itself to spread the message that Jesus Christ had been teaching before he was executed. The Church began, and very soon afterwards, the apostles started ordaining priests and so it goes until the present day presumably, when every ordained priest or minister should be able to trace his lineage to one of the twelve, at least in theory. The authority that flowed from those assumptions was doled out from one to another in perhaps the first pyramid scheme since the Egyptians. Eventually, the experience had to have become a little diluted. Certainly most ordinations today are not generally accompanied by the wind and fire of the Pentecost. It’s more of a graduation ceremony in most churches, where you receive the blessing of the hierarchy to transmit the message officially. Gone is the mystical experience, the direct connection with Spirit that gave the first apostles and the hundreds of people standing among them, the legs to preach the Gospel. So ordination, tracing its lineage back to the Pentecost, but avoiding the messiness of mystical enlightenment, becomes a process for inviting priests into the hierarchy of power that is the Church.
Simplified for sure, but perplexing to me nonetheless.
The second point though is really devastating. Along with the creation of this vast hierarchy came the notion that only those near the top had direct access to Spirit. That in fact access to Spirit was a privilege you might have the higher up you were. The implication of this was of course that people in high office were most holy, while those closest to the land were most heathen. For Indigenous folks, this was a definite disadvantage when they were confronted with European society. A hierarchical structure whose power was maintained through the notion that Sprit is a top down matter descended upon a people for whom the exact opposite was true. Spirit is in the earth and is accessible to all who practice the indigenous methods of connecting with the land. Methods, incidentally, given to humans by the Creator to allow people to be more fully in “place:” on the land and in touch with Spirit.
In all seriousness, I am beginning to see the power in the Pentecost like I have never seen it before.
As an interesting aside, I have a friend who studies in New Mexico with Rabbi Gershon Winkler, a teacher who practices what he calls Jewish flexidoxy. As I understand it Flexidoxy is a religious practice that begins with the assumption that Judaism is actually an indigenous religion and therefore needs strong connections to the land to be fully in tune with it’s entire spiritual experience. And if you can’t live in Israel where the religion has it’s home, then you need to understand the indigenous practices of the places where you do live and draw on them to express yourself as an Orthodox flexidox Jew. Rabbi Winkler writes:
The tradition in Judaism that the human was formed out of the earth is more than a simplistic metaphor or colorful homily. The theme runs continuously and consistently throughout the scriptural, legalistic, midrashic, and kabbalistic avenues of Jewish spiritual teachings…
The sanctity of the earth is described in the Jewish tradition beyond its relationship to the human, but also its relationship to the divine, whose presence, we are reminded, is no less in the earth as in the heavens: “And you will then know that I am Infinite One who dwells deep within the earth” (Exodus 8:18). The ancient rabbis further dramatized the sacredness of the earth by over her” (Genesis 2:15).
Winkler’s practice involves become a rabbinical shaman:
“All of our inspired prophets and teachers in ancient times received their inspiration and their supernatural capabilities…in the wilderness,” he said during a phone interview from his home in Cuba, N.M.
Citing such sages as Moses, Hillel and Akiva, he said Judaism’s great teachers drew from a font of wisdom that “went four levels beneath the literal interpretation of the Scriptures,” delving into personal experience of the Divine.
“It’s very similar to the Native American concept of the vision quest,” he said, adding that the parallels “came to me backwards, living in the wilderness surrounded by four Indian nations: Navajo, Apache, Jemez and Zia.
“In my spending time with them, observing their rituals by invitation, bells began ringing in my head — the shamanic rituals and ceremonies in our own tradition that we had lost over the centuries because we weren’t allowed to be a people of the land.
“So I went back to the scriptural teachings and many of the kabbalistic [mystical] postscriptural teachings that had been buried over the centuries, and the whole thing just became alive.”
Winkler is currently working on a book tentatively titled “The Way of the Jewish Shaman.” The shamanic path, he said, “involves the ability to shift reality.”
The idea that mystical experience and knowledge of Spirit comes from being “people of the land” is deeply compelling. For me, it completely turns the result of the Pentecost experience on its head.
